Professor Greg Downs dispels the common misunderstandings about social tension between "house slaves" and "field slaves" and discusses the fluidity between different roles and jobs for enslaved people on large plantations.

Historian Greg Downs describes how slave communities built associations to resist and survive the conditions of enslavement. His examples including slaves helping runaways, staking out space in outlying woods or other secluded areas, and building [...]

Historian Greg Downs describes the evolution of the slave patrol system in the American South. He also briefly describes how innovations created by slave patrols were the model for policing in later times.

Professor Greg Downs describes the pressures on family formation under slavery and the strategies that enslaved people employed to form and preserve families. He looks at what happened to families that broke up because of sale, westward migration, [...]